Issue 35: Cameron Clark

from Homeric Similes

*

As if you had gone into some new room in an old house you thought you knew, without raising your eyes, & after a long time like that you had lifted finally your arms above your head, eyes still down, & discovered almost violently the roof you'd thought to be an illusion of mass, its weight cobwebbing somewhere high above you into some shadow, was actually almost grazing the top of your skull, & now the walls & roof & floor seem curled into one faultless cage impinging upon you, & you begin to feel the clenched pigeonwings beneath your spine start to twitch & stutter.

*

As if once, when you were going into sleep, you heard them: the black gravel of their engines treacling into earshot, the sound of earth raked-up, worked-over, like it was world not road they were remoulding, in the blank space outside they'd come to unstain, the diggers & cement mixers of the new world you’d wake to, but, jerked awake too early, you had overheard their underwork; as if from now on each new day couldn't but be tarnished by the knowledge of its making.

*

As if he was a soundboard & must speak, though he was not the speaker but his sliced-off syllogisms, one crackled sentence after another ad infinitum, in any order ad infinitum: each word shoved up against a constant mesh of silence; & one day he turned in the air to find himself: & he wondered whether it was due to his own inability not to, or from dazed resignation, that he had all the time spoken?

*

As if she was reading “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” & felt the rage like magma oozing when she read about the Godlight at the end: its dues ex machina itching on the injured face of a man struggling that he might fit into a hole that is slightly too tight; & she wondered at its nerve, its white begging little finger on a dying eye; that when she closed the book all she could do was burn the rage into a thumb of light to catch her life in its piteous darkness on all sides.

*

As if it always had old-friended you, those nights spent in its lurid company: from boy- to man-sized curled in the silence between each tick on visits to your grandparents’ house: the clock a farmer harvesting its wooden acres on the spare-room bedside-table, & you never wondered what it might know or tell about you, though it was always gossiping long into the night, & never wondered what had turned its face so blank except for the hands that troved rumour like that might be enough to save it.

*

As if he was a crumpled man & lived only in farmhouses, though he was never able to stay in each for long: from farmhouse to farmhouse until they ran out, & he built himself a fearhouse instead — far from the cities prowling the treeline of paranoia’s horizon — & squatted there all his life until one day two boys came burgling & he unloaded his shotgun into one of their chests — raspberry-compote! — & didn’t confess his guilt when he was taken down, until finally an officer said the dead boy's name: as if he never dreamt his fear might be so boringly named.

*

As if it had never wanted for anything, all the mind of what mind it might have invested in circumference: in the white muscular flex of its waves; & you float there on your back in your skin: hoping against hope that you will grow as diffuse as it, as lavishly formless; & you never do: awkward crab that cannot crawl out of itself, you’re still human, still personal, you have been taught nothing though all around as you drift speck-like further out the sea is demonstrating lack.

*

As if once when he was inside of her he groaned her name: Alice, but she heard Alice — the first wife before her — tragically departed — & twisted away, shouting that he was thinking of Alice, not her, in her; & he, begging her not to be so stupid: trying to tug her inertness back, but she was as stiff as Stiff Alice: as if the past could sprout in the mouth, between the teeth, closer always than even the lips of the living we crush to ourselves.

Cameron Clark is a poet and Associate Editor at Literary Matters journal. Their poems have been published in Image Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, Literary Matters, Agenda Poetry, the Ekphrastic Review, and Autumn Sky Poetry Journal among others.

Copyright © 2026 by Cameron Clark, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.